Instagram user truecrimewithbella posted a video on March 3 in which she tells her followers that Iran has drafted a list of 11 US cities it intends to target militarily in response to the US-Israeli attack on Tehran. The list includes both large cities like Seattle and San Francisco, and more surprising choices like Cheyenne, Wyoming and Shreveport, Louisiana. The video has garnered nearly 10 million views.
It turns out, however, that this purported Iranian hit list doesn’t exist.
A series of links
When we typed the names of these towns and cities into a search engine, we quickly came across an article published by the British tabloid the Daily Mail on June 25, 2025, under the title "Chilling list reveals which US cities would be first targets hit in WWIII". The article makes no mention of Iran. Instead, it says "world policy experts, investigative journalists and financial analysts have warned about what could possibly happen if there was a third world war."
We found the origin of this list by following a series of links. If you click on the link on the words "financial analysts" in the first article, it sends you to another article published by the Daily Mail, this one in 2023. That article is based on an article published by the financial website 24/7 Wall St., which, in turn, cites an article published in Business Insider back in 2017.
The Business Insider article proved to be the most revealing. Its title does include the phrase, "Here are the places in the US most likely to be hit in a nuclear attack", but it turns out that the content of the article has nothing to do with Iran. Instead, the list is made up of US military bases that Russia should theoretically neutralise first to wipe out the US nuclear threat, according to Stephen Schwartz, the author of the book "Atomic Audit. The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940". Schwartz argues that big cities like New York and Los Angeles probably wouldn’t be the first targets for a rival nuclear power.
No sign of the Iran list
No legitimate news source has reported that Iran published or shared an official list of US targets.
The US Department of Homeland Security has not released a single alert calling for residents of these cities to evacuate or take shelter, which it would have to do if the threat was confirmed.
This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.
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